Japan – Page 5 – DU Abroad

A personal anthology of Everything Eurail. Everything I wish I knew before traveling around Europe by train (info that even TikTok won’t be able to help you with).

If you’re studying abroad in Europe, and want to travel as much as you can, you may want to consider the Eurail pass.

If you are currently a sophomore, or a junior reading this (and planning on studying abroad in the winter/spring, or even fall) Eurail pass does Black Friday sales. Which is absolutely worth it to buy in advance. It is a really good deal. You can buy your pass in advance, then you have up to a year to activate it whenever you want.

Here are some considerations and tips for choosing the best Eurail pass for you, and to help you decide if it is the right choice for you. As someone with a more limited abroad budget, it was absolutely worth it for me.

First, consider how close your host country is to the places you want to go. Or where you could travel to by train. For example, I was in Florence, Italy. I traveled around Italy by train, and to Slovenia, Austria, Germany, and took a train from London to Edinburgh/Belgium. As well as by train in the UK and the Netherlands. The train station was central in Florence, and easy to access, making trains a great, budget friendly travel choice.

If you’re planning on studying in the UK or nearby, I recommend the Eurail pass! Trains and transportation are VERY expensive in the UK. No matter the time of year. For example I traveled from London to Edinburgh, the train I took would have cost $150 for a 2nd class ticket. Which would be around 35% of my Eurail pass cost, but for just ONE trip.

Also consider how many trips you’ll want to take, and if you need to take high speed trains or not.

A great option for a semester abroad is the unlimited Eurail pass for 2 or 3 months. This is an amazing option for flexibility, budget, day trips and weekend trips. When you’re traveling by train in Europe , flexibility is KEY. It may seem like a lot up front. But it is worth it if you are going to be traveling every weekend (or almost every weekend). Plus it’s nice to get one travel expense out of the way. Take advantage of the Black Friday sale!

It may been intimidating or hard to know what Eurail pass to choose at first, but if you do some quick calculations you can decide which one is best for you.

For example, I had the 10 trip Eurail pass over two months. But I think the perfect pass choice would be 15 travel days over two months. Having the extra travel days for more flexibility and longer travel days is worth it.

Something else important to note, is the amount of months/days the pass will be valid for! If you want to spread out your trips, you definitely don’t want to do the limited number of days in one month. You will get a better value by doing the 10 or 15 days over two months, or unlimited. For example, I decided to extend my last trip by one day. But I forgot that my pass expired that next day. So when I got on the train I had to pay for a full ticket price, even though I still technically had a travel day left on my pass, it didn’t matter because my pass was expired.

Obviously Eurail pass is best for going location to location, not back and forth from one place (like weekend trips). However I was able to make it work no problem, and I really recommend it, as individual train ticket prices can be more expensive and change a LOT. Some people took 3-4 trains in Italy and it cost around the same price at my 10 day trip pass.

No one really talks about train strikes or warns you about them. Italy particularly, was a bit notorious for train strikes. I was not expecting them, didn’t know much about them, and wasn’t warned about them (even by my program in Florence). SO PSA: If you’re studying abroad in Italy and planning on taking trains, look in advance for train strikes. Most of them will be scheduled, but sometimes it’s hard to find specific information. Important lesson that I learned the hard way, if there’s a possibility or uncertainty of a strike, schedule around it. Or arrange backup plans. When I was in Italy, there were particularly many strikes, significantly more than other countries.

Other countries may also have train strikes. If you’re taking a train somewhere to/from a major city, check this before planning your trip. For example Netherlands, Germany, Paris, etc…

However this should not deter you from traveling by train, and you can easily avoid any issues by planning ahead.

Always book trains with at the MINIMUM 10 minutes between each other. But if possible, aim for 20-30 for transfer time. Most trains (especially regional ones can easily get behind schedule), and some train stations may be hard, or crowded to navigate. So most times you won’t even have to wait 1hr – 30 mins between trains, if you’re taking a regional train in any country.

A great pro of using a Eurail pass is having stop overs along the way to your destination! This is how I got to see multiple cities from just one trip/or travel day use. For example, I had a 6 hour stopover in Rome, a 4 hour stopover in Venice. So I got to explore them without using an extra travel day, or buying another ticket.

Lastly and most importantly. Travel days. Something I learned the hard way, is what was considered a ‘travel day’ for Eurail. I had to rework all my trips, and take more high speed trains, to try and just use two travel days for each weekend trip. This is a pro of the unlimited pass, you don’t need to worry about the number or travel days or taking late trains. But let me break it down for you:

When you get your Eurail pass you ‘activate’ it when you’re ready to take your first trip.

From that first activation, your month(ly) period begins. For example if you have a month long pass, and activate it on the 1st of September, it will expire on the 1st of October. Even if you don’t use all your travel days. So use your days before it expires!

You can choose what travel days to activate your pass on (if you have 10 or 15 travel days for example). You need to activate your travel day before getting on the train, or else you risk a fine.

A travel day is a period of 24 hours. Try to take trains earlier in the day to avoid having to use two travel days to get somewhere.

So let’s say you’re taking a train at 8pm, and then you have to take another train at 12am (you’ll need to use two travel days).

You need to activate your pass and get your seat reservations BEFORE getting on the train. This is how you avoid fines or not being allowed on. Some high speed trains only have a certain number of seats for Eurail pass holders. For example, when I was in Amsterdam I wanted to take a high speed train to Belgium, but it had been booked up for a month already because of this limited availability. Same with in London. And they were very strict on it.

Obviously taking trains takes longer than flying, but it’s also a beautiful way to see different countries. I only had two days of classes, so that’s how I was able to take longer train journeys. But even if you have class 4 days a week you can make it work. If you take night trains or high speed trains, it is possible to make a short weekend trip happen. Or you can use your pass for day trips explorations. Everyone should experience a train trip at least once on their abroad experience, especially since it is something we don’t have in the US.

I hope this is helpful if you are considering the Eurail pass for studying abroad, or at any point in the future!

Overall, I do recommend the Eurail pass if you’re studying abroad (in Italy especially), for flexibility, seeing MANY places around the country you’re in, and visiting countries nearby. It is a better rate than flying or buying individual tickets.

Happy travels! 🙂

I arrived in Japan at around 4:30pm on Monday, March 12th. It was rainy, which I worried would make me gloomy, especially as I was about to land on a continent where I quite literally knew no one. Yet, as I looked out the window of the plane, descending to the farthest place from home I had ever been, I felt thankful for the rain. I was glad there was no grand, open sky for me to throw my lofty expectations of unending happiness and excitement at; I was glad that I was forced to notice the skinny streams of water droplets mere inches from my face, which were simultaneously a familiar sight and a strange comprehension- the water I was looking at was part of a complex web of movement and history and life- a whole way of being that was entirely foreign to me and everything I had ever known. In an honest way, I am glad that my first view of Japan was small intimate, and boring. It gave me the chance to look inward one last time before I would be changed so drastically again.

I have been here for 5 days now, although I feel I have lived another lifetime since landing! I have been trying my best to curb culture shock by speaking as much Japanese as I can- I am so glad I brought my textbooks so I can review and study what I’ve already learned. It is funny how being surrounded by a language can change how the physical world is taken in by your senses; I have been catching myself thinking small phrases in Japanese. For instance, when I realized one of my vacuum-seal bags had small holes in it, preventing it from flattening, my first thought was “ダメ！” (dame), which means “no good,” and in this case, with a feeling of “shucks!” Yuta, who is married to the owner of the hostel I am staying at, kindly brought me tape and sat with me while I tried to see if I could somehow mend the bag.

Yuta and his family (Nana- the owner, and their daughter, Anna), live in the Tokyo hostel with the guests. They have a passageway in the wall of the dining area- a hole about waist height with a curtain for privacy- through which they move between their home space and the hostel space. However, similarly to the thin barrier of the curtain, which divides more visually than it does physically, the boundary between their home and the hostel is quite open. Nana, Yuta, and Anna use the same showers and communal spaces as the guests do; often in the evenings when I come home for the night, Anna is watching cartoons on the TV in the front room. Observing Tokyo has been so interesting in this way- there is a mindfulness of space that does not seem to be so present in the United States. Efficiency is always considered, and usually, only what space is needed is what is allotted and used. On the side streets of Tokyo, where there are narrow roads not fitting for American SUVs or trucks, there is a painted green line on one side of the pavement, where pedestrians and bikes are designated to travel.

In my eyes, there were obviously “problems” with this, as bikes and people cannot fit on this narrow path together. With sharp corners, intermittent cars, and constant cyclists whizzing by, at first, it seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. I thought this is so dangerous! Yet, after walking these streets for a few days, it is ironic how accident-unprone they are, given how little space there is to maneuver. Bikers are always conscious of pedestrians and move around them with plenty of time to adjust and create more space. Cars move slowly in these side streets, and their drivers are always turning mindfully. Sometimes, they have a loudspeaker, bouncing the echo of their presence across the winding cement, brick, and pavement. They can squeeze through walls and people with mere inches on each side with ease! And the pedestrians don’t need much more space than the little green line. There is a flow to the function of it all that I have never seen before! Initially, I felt uncomfortable wondering if I was using the streets correctly, but there was a special charm in how easy it was to learn after only a day or so.

I have been contemplating how much of this experience I want to share on this blog, on my social media, and with my friends and family. Even admitting that I am struggling to know what to share and what to keep feels like I’ve let something intimate slip away, where I will never find it again. Yet, I want my blog posts to share not only what I see and do while studying abroad, but also what I feel. I think that any experience is a dynamic movement of all three- senses, actions, and feelings- in which each one cannot be fully complete without the others informing it. I decided that I was not going to worry so much about documenting everything- writing, photographing, telling someone- because as much as I love sharing this new life, it is still mine to hold. Even further, it is okay that some parts of my experience are forgotten, even to me.

With that being said, I only have one more thing I want to share in this post before I conclude my (first?) stay in Tokyo and move to Kyoto for the rest of my time in Japan. As I was leaving the airport, riding the busy local train cars, my face red and sweaty from all the transfers to new lines and treacherous stair climbing with my heavy luggage, a man pushed through the packed bodies of the subway to reach me. He recognized me as a fellow foreigner and could tell I was flustered, so he asked me in English if I was okay. I said yes, and I told him I had just arrived from the airport. What he said to me next I will never forget, as it seemed too serendipitous to be natural and unprompted, and I have carried the image of his face close to mine between the poles, and the exact words he said since it happened close to my heart, like a precious gem he gifted to me that I can never misplace: “Japan will change your life.” I asked him his name, which was Mohan, and he then proceeded to joke, “Maybe I will see you around here!” gesturing to the train car and acknowledging that we would really only know each other for that one brief moment. I might not see Mohan again, but it seems to me that our moment of connection was somehow the manifestation of a long chain of kindness that had no beginning or end within either of us but had woven itself into a thread of our lives, a thread that he passed to me on that train, which solidified the messy fibers of my overwhelming emotion into an attitude that has already changed me entirely. And I want to emphasize that although lovely and surreal, it was not magic that did it, but the natural urge towards the association that is so innate in humans, and that link between our eyes that holds the quiet substance of exactly how transformative study abroad can be.

In these past five days, of moments so small that they take up miles of my memory, full of old ladies at the laundromat, scattered oranges beneath fruit trees, and crisp, waving laundry on seemingly infinite balconies, I have felt a lack of reverberation within me, a dullness where I expected a sharp echo. I don’t know if it is a feeling universal to solo travelers, but its silence forces me to see how everything is changing (right now!) within me. I can’t stop it, but more importantly, I can choose where to direct it. I think that is what Mohan meant.

Tag: Japan

Eurail & train pros & cons

Japan will change your life